A watch for @jwz: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/introducing-toledano-and-chan-b1-dazzle

Should you apply for faculty positions at public universities in Texas?

Short answer: No.

Longer answers: No and no.

This is a fantastic mid-mo restoration by Nicholas Dunning (OTO Group Architecture). Just perfect.

Listing: https://www.realestate.co.nz/43146024/residential/sale/806a-gordon-road-raureka

More photos: https://www.otogroup.nz/gordon.html

Sad news: Mark Swed, the LA Times’s classical music critic, is retiring. The paper is not committing to hiring a full-time replacement.

https://www.sfcv.org/articles/music-news/mark-sweds-departure-huge-loss-la-music

Thinking of Oppenheimer, advising, and research problem selection lately: “Put that down; put it back where you found it […] That was not for you to find.”

(The excerpt is from pp. 170–71 of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus, Vintage, 2005.)

Oh no, RIP Margaret Hamilton

https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

MIKE is finally here and I am so excited! 80B public keys! 4.86ms secret generation! A proper NIKE! Security is just the isogeny problem! Short and simple constant-time implementation in both C and rust! This has to be the curve25519 of its generation.

https://mike.isogeni.es/

@skinnylatte during a pre-grad school visit,I went to a faculty member’s house for a dinner party. She pulled me aside and wanted to show me something. It turned out that she had a number of Chinese artifacts purchased before China put a ban on exporting these things. Some of them were grave goods. It was just a really surreal experience. I don’t know that these were important things but there is just something uncomfortable about taking a grave good and placing it in your home. Of course, she wanted to show me because I’m Chinese 🤦‍♀️ and I couldn’t very well say anything because she was quite famous.

Is there a public document available that lays out the security architecture of Aluminum OS? What makes it more secure against persistent compromise than stock Android?

Here's something my 18-year old daughter has been making with some of her writer friends. It's "Young Writers Yap", a radio show and Podcast on Plains Media–Te Reo Irirangi O Te Maania.

They've published 11 episodes so far, interviewing different talented local writers. It's lots of fun, with some incredibly creative people.

"This show is for anyone curious about the world of writing in Aotearoa. Whether you’re a curious student, a schoolteacher, a writer yourself, or something completely unrelated, this is the place for you! You’ll walk away with poetry, tricks of the trade, and inspiration— on top of having experienced the real-life chaos of Young Writers Yap."

It's the first radio production of Write On, a fantastic local writers' collective that runs weekend and summer holidays workshops for young writers. It was inspirational for our daughter.

Plains Media is Ōtautahi-Chirstchurch's non-profit community radio station run from Ara, the city's Polytech.

Check it out if it might be your kind of thing.

https://plains.org.nz/programme/youngwritersyap

https://www.schoolforyoungwriters.org/

#nz #WriteOn #podcast #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #writers #YoungWriters #poetry #fiction #PlainsMedia #YoungWritersYap

But here’s the thing I learned: you don’t bet against Ben.

Today, VotingWorks has the first US-federally certified open-source voting system: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/votingworks-makes-history-as-first-open-source-voting-system-to-earn-federal-certification-302891573.html

A new critical edition of the Parnassus plays comes out this month! Edited by Andrew Hadfield and Neil Rhodes for the Revels series (Manchester University Press).

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526165527/

"This article ... calls for systematic research into corporate capture and the conditions under which faculty unions and collective organizing can defend and expand shared governance...

across the top sixty US research universities from 2003 to 2017, trustees whose primary vocation is in business or finance hold roughly three-quarters of governing board seats"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626004366

#academia #uspol #HIgherEd #unions #CorporateCapture #PolicingTheCampus

Happy New Heninger Paper Day to all who celebrate!

An under-appreciated 2007 algorithm of Joux, Naccache, and Thomé allows an attacker to forge RSA signatures after temporary access to a raw RSA signing/decryption oracle in time close to the special number field sieve (SNFS) without factoring the key. We implement and run this algorithm for 1024-bit RSA. In total, the attack took 1380 CPU core-years over five calendar months, and made 232 oracle queries. Most of this time is precomputation; after the precomputation the attacker can forge any signature of choice, offline, in 180 core-years.

Laura Shea, Miro Haller, Adam Suhl, Nadia Heninger, and Emmanuel Thomé, “Forging 1024-bit RSA signatures in nearly SNFS time,” Sep. 2026. Online: https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2131

Context for the SF Opera orchestra contract dispute, from Lisa Hirsch:

Currently, SFO says that ticket sales cover about 14% of the budget. The vast majority of the rest comes from fund-raising and draw from endowment.

I know that the orchestra and many audience members are saying that more performances are the answer, but given that ticket sales cover only 14% of the overall cost of putting on opera, for every performance added, you need to somehow secure the other 86% of the budget from other sources.

https://irontongue.blogspot.com/2026/09/san-francisco-opera-orchestra-strike.html

What Calibre developers have done here is an affront to the human act of creation, and no less than a fascist attack on art. I do not believe that to be even slightly an exaggeration, even if it does sound hyperbolic.

To have a fascist attack on art come from an open source project that used to stand for helping users free their e-books from proprietary lock-in is beyond disgusting.

But I don't get to say something like that without backing it up by action.

to anyone who says that people who don't like being mansplained to, etc. "don't know how social media work", i invite you to read this essay on how public speech and comment "work" to silence women

"My aim here – and I acknowledge the irony of my being given the space to address the subject – is to take a long view, a very long view, on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women

#Mastodon

SF Opera and the Opera orchestra have (tentatively) agreed to a new four-year contract! The season restarts next week. Gabe Young, chair of the orchestra's negotiating committee:

We are heartened to have reached a tentative deal that provides a fair contract and stability for the members of the orchestra [...] we want to thank the public and Opera patrons for their patience and support through what has been a challenging process for our musicians.

https://www.sfoperaorchestra.org/

On https://lemire.me/blog/2026/09/15/subnormal-floating-point-numbers-are-expensive-on-intel-processors/, if you're wondering why that is:

- For FP add, full-speed subnormals are a minor complication. The algs are well-known but neither change area significantly nor do they worsen the critical path appreciably.
- For FP FMA, likewise. The most common FMA designs already have a big shift for the augend before the add and a full-width normalization shifter after. Subnormals again are mildly harder but no big area/latency impact.

https://gerardmanleyhopkins.com/poem/hurrahing-in-harvest/